The Call of the Wild is a fabulous version of the young adult adventure story (including brave animals, Indians, a contest, etc.), and it is also a sophisticated exploration of the roles of Nature in shaping destiny in a naturalistic, deterministic, and transcendentalist sense.
The style in which Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild at first seems stereotypically masculine and precise in an overbearing way, but any grand tone is tempered by a stoic regard for humanity. The novel is enthusiastic throughout, and it is about transformation.
The protagonist and only character the reader is allowed any firsthand insight into is the amazing husky, Buck. All other characters flit by as though swimming under the ice, their features never sharp, their motivations and emotions mostly related to the reader in sentence-long, omniscient, self-contained flashes—even these flashes usually in direct association with Buck: “Spitz, as lead-dog and acknowledged master of the team, felt his supremacy threatened by this strange Southland dog” (72). Buck is the center of everything.
Because Buck is not a human being, he can be lent the objectivity reputedly taken on by the naturalist writer. Buck’s objectivity is accentuated in turn by this outsider status, and through Buck, London seeks to indoctrinate the reader in pure experience:
At first step upon the cold surface, Buck’s feet sank into a white mushy something very like mud. He sprang back with a snort. More of this white stuff was falling through the air. He shook himself, but more of it fell upon him. He sniffed it curiously, then licked some up on his tongue. It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him. He tried it again, with the same result. The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow. (54)
It seems as though London’s motivation in this is to couple the transcendentalist worship of Nature with the allegiance to Science that characterizes much of his era. Buck is inextricable from his environment, from the natural stimuli that determine his evolving fate, but he still remains an objective observer—it is not that he is without ego, but that his experiences are pure, instinctual, and unfettered.
Thus, London garners flexibility. Because Buck presides over all events and circumstances in the novel, the heat is off: London can vacillate between omniscience, objectivity, unabashed melodrama (“Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine” [135]), and can overtly begin to philosophize—and all this as deemed necessary to move the characterization of Buck away from straight, inherently disingenuous anthropomorphism, or attributing human emotions to animals. London has accrued many entertaining tools with which to shift focus strategically.
He also keeps men in the picture, though they are always transient (“And that was the last of Francois and Perrault. Like other men, they passed out of Buck’s life for good” [85]). This haziness, though, reinforces their connectedness to the environment—indeed, the human beings in The Call of the Wild are rarely more than stimuli—which, again, allows London a certain stylistic flexibility. He capitalizes on this in order to indulge his enthusiasm and infatuation with natural selection and the relatively fresh idea of placing humanity in evolutionary context.
When Buck has primordial visions of “the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and hands clasped above,” a man who “could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground” (125), London is at his most exuberant. It is his sobriety that is his saving grace in the midst of this possible overenthusiasm—he has the striking insight that “(t)he salient thing of this other world seemed fear” (125).
London is always mentioning qualities and traits; he condenses the evolutionary recurrences in the novel into separate learned behaviors, such as “The Law of Club and Fang,” and doggedly points out the learning process:
He [Buck] was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. (51)
So, while The Call of the Wild is an exemplar of Jack London’s dual fascination with natural science and transcendentalist ideas, it is also about continual transformation. There is growth in every chapter: “. . . it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control” (65); “later his feet grew hard to the trail, and the worn-out footgear was thrown away” (71); “he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility” (130).
London’s style reflects this consistent growth, utilizing his potboilerish format to pile on thick detail and description, primarily concerning dogs and landscape, thus engineering an entertaining building-up that is never without a summary action or payoff. In this way, the progression of the men in the novel builds to the one Buck loves—“it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head” (135)—and then past him. This aesthetic of progression, of a slow but consistent and repeated blooming, is used by London to call attention away from dualism and to produce a refined adventure.
Source
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories. Edited by Andrew Sinclair. New York: Penguin, 1981.
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